Thermoregulation by Bullsnakes (<i>Pituophis catenifer sayi</i>): do burrows make life easier on the prairies?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reptiles living in the grasslands of Western Canada cope with extremely variable environmental temperatures. We studied body temperatures (Tb) and operative environmental temperatures (Te) for Bullsnakes (Pituophis catenifer sayi (Schlegel, 1837)) to address uncertainties regarding challenges posed by the thermal environments of northern grasslands, and to evaluate conflicting hypotheses regarding thermoregulatory strategies. Despite potentially extreme surface temperatures (meanmin. = 9.3 °C, meanmax. = 31.4 °C), mammal burrows remained within voluntary limits (15–35 °C) for 93% of the active season and created thermal gradients (up to 27.2 °C) which may facilitate thermoregulation by creating high thermal heterogeneity. This evidence suggests that grasslands may actually be less challenging for thermoregulation than comparable forests. Fifty-eight percent (57.8%) of the variation in observed Tb (meanmin. = 20.1 °C, meanmax. = 29.1 °C) was explained by three simple variables: time of day, day of year, and bare ground Te. Bullsnakes thermoregulated by conforming to Te near their preferred range (21–27 °C), selecting locations that enabled heating up below this range and avoiding warmth above this range. Our results support broad hypotheses of reptilian thermoregulation that predict increased thermoregulation when (i) environmental temperatures deviate farther from preferred ranges and (ii) costs of thermoregulation are lower due to thermal heterogeneity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".